I know you are tired of hearing me talk about this, hell I am tired of having to talk about this.
The world is not friendly to those who want to display their sexuality. Facebook, Instagram, PayPal, Google and many other companies will block or ban you for the faintest whiff of anything sexual. There are the crazed Anti-robot sex people and “Sex Educators” who don’t believe you can orgasm with a partner, so much prudery that the mind boggles. And the UK government is at it again. Rather than putting money and effort into educating parents and children they have opted instead to suppress information and choice under the thinly disguised veil of “save the children”. They are planning to rid the internet of porn. Not just made in the UK porn but all of the porn.
I know that people think I cry wolf when these things come along but sadly I have a track record of being right. This is starting off as a way to clamp down on the tube sites and has the support of the larger porn players because it is a way to claw lost revenue back. Now I want the porn industry to succeed, but this is a short sighted move because the prudes will come for them eventually as well. The UK will start with the easiest marks. Like Dreams of Spanking because these are the people least likely to have the resources to fight the government. But before you bloggers breathe a sigh of relief the language in the new law say that if you make any income from you site you will have to have age verification. That means affiliate links, sponsored posts, or ads anything that makes you any money at all. Break the rules and have to pay £250,000 or five percent of your income, whichever is larger.
Some don’t think they will go after bloggers, I say that they are wrong. You are the easiest target, if the government says do as we say or face a fine what are you going to do? You will either participate in what I am sure will be an expensive program to comply or you will close down your site. The government will be very happy either way.
The Digital Economies Bill went through a public consultation where the majority of respondents said it was a terrible idea. But they chose to ignore that and say that a majority of respondents that had children thought it was a good idea. So they have already cherry picked the data that already agreed with what they wanted in the first place.
Pandora Blake has a far more detailed post about what this could mean. Go read that.
This will have worldwide impact as other countries wait to see how it works in the UK. So write your MP, write a post and share this with everyone that will support us in our right to express who we are and and maybe even make some money from what we do. I do not believe that it is our job to parent other peoples children. We keep ours safe by being engaged, there is no role for Theresa May in that relationship.
Can we please fix this? Because I am really tired of writing about it.
Michael
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